What Is Pagerank and How Do I Increase It?

What Is Pagerank and How Do I Increase It?

Full Transcript:

Hi, I’m Kurt Steinbrueck with OurChurch.com. In this video, I’m going to explain what PageRank is and how you can increase your PageRank.

So what is PageRank?PageRank is a system that Google developed to help them determine how authoritative sites are, how valuable sites are. When they’re producing search results for people, they’re not only trying to produce relevant results, but they want the best relevant results. They want the sites that are authoritative, the sites that other people think are valuable. So, they developed this PageRank to do that.

PageRank is primarily based on links.

How many links does a site have coming to it?

How authoritative are the sites that are linking to you?

How relevant are those sites that are linking to you? Do they have anything to do with what you do, what your site is about?

So. those are the things that they’re looking at.

The Analogy of a Restaurant:Maybe a good way to think about this would be an analogy. I like the analogy of a restaurant. Let’s say you wanted to go out to eat, and you’re trying to decide what restaurant you want to go to, and you just have some random person come by and they say, “You know, I really like Bob’s Steakhouse.” Well, what’s that going to mean to you? It’s probably not going to mean a lot, because you don’t know who this person is and you don’t know what their tastes are. You don’t even know if they’ve been to Bob’s Steakhouse; so, it doesn’t really mean much to you.

Now, on the other hand, if you had several friends come up to you and say, “You know, I’ve been to Bob’s Steakhouse, and I like Bob’s Steakhouse,” that’s going to start to mean something. They’re your friends; you probably know a little bit about their tastes in food and trust them. That’s going to mean a bit more and you’re more likely to think that Bob’s Steakhouse is a good place to eat.

One more would be what if a food critic came and said, “Bob’s Steakhouse is an excellent place to eat.” Here you have someone who does this for a living. They’re a professional food critic. They go to restaurants all the time. You know they have really good taste in food. That’s going to mean a lot, if this person is saying that Bob’s Steakhouse is really good.

How Google Looks at Different Links:

The search engines are kind of the same with their links.

1. Random, Low Quality Links:If you have a link from just some random site that has nothing to do with what your site is about and doesn’t have much authority, that doesn’t really mean much to them. So you can get hundreds of those links, and it’s not going to mean a whole lot. It’s not going to build your PageRank very much.

2. Relevant, Low – Moderately Authoritative Links:However, if you have sites that are in the search engines, they’re kind of established, maybe they’re not really authoritative, but they’re related to what you’re doing, and they’re linking to you, then those are like your friends. You know their tastes and you know that it’s relevant. For the search engines, that’s going to mean a bit more. “Okay, these sites, they know about this topic, and we already kind of trust them, and so they’re all saying that this site’s good by linking to them.” That’s going to start to build up your PageRank, getting those kind of links. A lot of those links can be very helpful for you.

3. Relevant High Authority Sites:Now, if you can get a link from a site that’s very well-established, has a great reputation, is very authoritative in your niche, it’s something that’s relevant to what you do, that’s going to mean even more. That’s going to be like that food critic that says “This is a really good restaurant.” So when the search engines see links from the really well-established, authoritative sites, then that one link can be worth a dozen of the smaller sites’ links and hundreds and hundreds of the irrelevant just random links that are out there. So, getting those links is how you’re going to build up your PageRank. The more of these links, especially the relevant and the more authoritative they are, those are going to be building up your PageRank and making your site more valuable to the search engines.

How Do You Get Links?

How do you do that? Well, the best way to do that is by creating great content and doing a really good job with what you do.

1. Doing A Great Job:Just doing a great job at whatever your website does, that can get links. That can get people talking about you, so these people who have related sites may say, “This is a really good vendor for whatever” or “This site does a really great job of this service,” and they’ll just link to you because you do a great job and they appreciate that.

2. Creating Great Content:The other thing is creating great content. If you create something that will be valuable to these other sites’ visitors and that they think is really, really good content, then they’re going to want to link to that and share that with their visitors. So that’s another great way to get those sites to link back to you, and the more you do it, the more likely they’re going to link back to you. Because if you’re consistently putting out great content, then people are more likely to link back to you.

Added Bonus!

You also get the benefit of those sites are telling other people about you, so beyond PageRank, real people are learning about your site and visiting your site, and you’re creating a real reputation, a brand for your site, and that’s very good. That’s always good, to be able to reach out to the actual people, not just to the little machines that run the search engines.

So that’s what PageRank is and that’s how you build up your PageRank, and of course, all that comes together to give you better rankings and bring more people into your site.

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